Can they survive this?

As we noted yesterday, the team is doing its best to portray the injury to Chien-Ming Wang in as positive a manner as possible, in an attempt to retain some measure of leverage in potential trade talks. Of course, if the Yanks were being realistic about this, they'd know that teams won't be fooled. With the team's own beat reporters saying Wang's entire season is in doubt, pretending that things are okay doesn't work. In fact, Anthony Rieber goes so far as to say Wang is "probably" out for the season; Pete Abe adds that he's out until "at least" September.

Oh, note to Hank: blaming the NL rules doesn't fix anything and, for what it's worth, the "NL rules" -- whatever that means -- are not that antiquated. They diverge from the AL in one big way, but that's it. If Hank was being honest with himself, he'd see the Yanks just caught bad luck, of which they seem to have a lot.

The optimist in us says that the Yanks can survive this. The realist in us says the Yanks will struggle a little, and lean heavily on their streaky bats a lot.

Stranger things have happened than staying the course without your ace, of course, but even the best team in the league wouldn't deal well with losing three-fifths of the original starting rotation.

While Hank is never really rational, Wang's injury has brought about an interesting phenomenon. Judging from our comments and e-mails, fans are dealing with the loss of the ace pretty well, and generally seem to agree that Sabathia is not the answer. In other words, people are avoiding the Boss George-like sentiment to just go out and get the best player available. For those fans, they will be happy to read Ken Davidoff's rationale as to why Sabathia isn't likely to land in the Bronx. Similar stuff from Joel Sherman. On a general level, by the way, kudos to all of us (not to mention the columnists) for not overreacting...

Great, just what the Red Sox need: another knuckleballer on the rise. We've heard about Charlie Zink before, and it looks like he's on his way. He even has a knuckleballer's name -- Charlie Zink. Sounds awfully close to Charlie Hough.

We sure are glad the Yanks went through this stuff in the offseason; the way the Mets handled the firing of Willie Randolph -- the slow descent, the overnight firing -- it's gotta be bad for business and team morale.